....."actuated by a determination to make the world safe for Democracy hereafter".....organized labor in England, makes a pronouncement of their war support. Two out of three voting that way. Wonder what the minority was thinking as an alternative?

New Years Day 1918. What started off as a blood letting dual of honor over the death of an obscure archduke, by what today we would call a lone wolf terrorist, now has turned into Good versus Evil as the only explanation for the continuing blood bath. There will be no negotiated Peace. There is no negotiating with the devil and all peace talk feelers from the Axis are rebuked with prejudice, even with the revolutionary Russians disentangling Russia from the war.

What started off as a blood letting dual of honor over the death of an obscure archduke

That is a bit like like saying that D Day was only to put Rommel's nose out of joint........If you can, watch the first 10 minutes of 'Oh What a Lovely War', it explains it rather well.

Duncan

What contemptible scoundrel has stolen the cork to my lunch? -- W.C. Fields "Many of those who enjoy freedom know little of its price." You can't fix Stupid, but you can occasionally head it off before it hurts something.

Like most people, I know World War I at second or third hand, through such sources as Robert Graves' "Goodbye to All That." The most dramatic point Graves makes is that the war almost literally exterminated the generation that would have ruled Britain in the 1930s and 1940s. Something like 90 per cent of the field officers were killed on some fronts. Joseph Losey's film "King and Country" shows us Tom Courtenay as the lone survivor of his original unit; every other man had been killed, and many of their replacements had died as well. This was apparently fairly common.

And so this tragic event sank into the bones of the British memory. America, which came into the war rather late and sustained much lighter casualties, could afford the luxury of a "lost generation" in the 1920s. England literally lost her generation; it was dead and buried, and we seem to see it beneath the countless crosses stretching out behind John Mills in the last, stunning graveyard shot in "Oh! What a Lovely War."

And yet war films and books have usually not recorded this loss, or the enormity of the stupidity which caused it. Those which have (like "King and Country") have done it in microcosm; we care for the Courtenay character, but we do not reflect on the total war. "Oh! What a Lovely War" does recreate this time, in a bitter mixture of history, satire, detail, panorama and music.

At least there was some potential for some peace talk. But... not a very strong one. Good must conquer evil was the general mantra....rather than negotiate with it. Besides... our side thought it was on the path to victory and would be able to dictate the peace terms pretty soon now.

Wilson says me too to Lloyd George with a little different word spin on the "we don't demand the banishment of German Monarchy"...but we really do part. The reparations are soft peddled but obviously without limitation and the colonial possessions are to be forfeited with little mercy ....the ones belonging to Germany, Turkey and Austria that is.

The general in charge at Ft. Lewis was replaced and the new post commander decided that Seattle wasn't such a din of sin as the man who preceded him thought that he removed the order that Seattle is off limits. However....since the soldiers under his command were forbidden from getting more than 20 miles from base it really didn't matter all that much to them I'd imagine. However....big headline in the newspaper anyway.

Billy Sunday was the rock star of his day. He could pack the biggest venues of his day with people and..... do it twice a day. His awe inspiring attraction was as an evangelical one man preaching show. All sorts of Protestant churches would even band together to bring him to town to preach his peculiar folksy crusade message complete with moves like a baseball diamond hero that he claimed to have one time been. The people ate it up. In later days another Billy would do the same while clawing tightly onto Presidents like Eisenhower and others in succession. And that Billy's son, following the program, has made a grab at connecting with Trump....although I read that recently politicians in England are trying to ban him from making speaking appearances there over ..something.

Billy Sunday was an attraction that was always front page news and his sermons were reported nearly verbatim to the reading press of large cities all over the US that he appeared in.

If Billy had any political bent it was surely conservative Republican by today's standards even though there was no such concept in those days.

US fuel czar has what seems to be a chicken little moment that gets a lot of push back. He wants to close everything East of the Mississippi down for a week and then start back up with Mondays as holidays. This would include stuff like department stores and movie houses as well as manufacturing according to one newspaper's understanding.

The coal shortage during the winter was seen as a supply by train problem and this is what Garfield was trying to correct.

So why are we fighting is the question asked of US troops in Europe by a reporter. The reporter is shocked to find out that half of them have no idea of why they are there. Thankfully...in his estimation... the over seas branch of the YMCA is indoctrinating them in how important the war is to the US. However..... the response he gets from the unschooled troops he interviewed reminds me of my war a half century later. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn ... d-1/seq-1/

We all have heard of the "The Blitz" of WWII that saw the Germans bomb London and other parts of England. In the first World War, a hundred years ago, those seemingly toy like aircraft on the German side did the same thing on a less destructive scale. Note how the largest number of casualties in this attached newspaper story were women and children. Terrorism isn't anything new. It's been part of war ...probably...forever.

Just goes to show how elementary the defenses were in those days AND it also goes to prove how Germany, time and time again upped the overall destructiveness of the way to wage war, involving civilians by U Boats, Gas, Flame Throwers and Bombing to name but a few of their contributions to depravity. This attitude continued a pace to the end of the war and was continued by the Nazis later.

I have no time for them as a nation, then or now. This attitude also covers the Japanese ..................

Duncan

What contemptible scoundrel has stolen the cork to my lunch? -- W.C. Fields "Many of those who enjoy freedom know little of its price." You can't fix Stupid, but you can occasionally head it off before it hurts something.

Duncan, WWII was the only war that had to be won by our side against the Germans and those countries that sided with them. WWI was all about pride on both sides and the winner looking to be at the throat of the loser and making them pay. It could have ended a lot earlier than it did.

In WWII, those that fought it on the side of the allies were deserving of being remembered as "the greatest generation". At the same time, from the point of view of horrors committed, our side did it's share of wholesale slaughter of non combatants....actually more. Dresden for instance:

The bombing of Dresden was a British/American aerial bombing attack on the city of Dresden, the capital of the German state of Saxony, that took place during the Second World War in the European Theatre. In four raids between 13 and 15 February 1945, 722 heavy bombers of the British Royal Air Force (RAF) and 527 of the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) dropped more than 3,900 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices on the city.[1] The bombing and the resulting firestorm destroyed over 1,600 acres (6.5 km2) of the city centre.[2] An estimated 22,700[3] to 25,000[4] people were killed, although larger casualty figures have been claimed over the years

Remember that experimental atom bomb that we first tried out on Japan to shorten the war? The US had no idea how much actual damage it would do. When we saw how terrible it was, and the Japs didn't surrender immediately, we dropped another one. The second time we know what it would do and how many it would kill or terribly injure. The Germans and Japs didn't have an atomic weapon yet so we were first....and only..for the moment... to use atomic weapons to kill large numbers of people.

The only evil thing that the Germans did that the allies didn't do, was to produce extermination camps in WWII.....save maybe the Russians which often just killed people without going to the trouble of herding them into camps first. The millions of civilians, particularly Jews, that the Germans methodically murdered was truly an atrocity of enormous proportions that the Allies were innocent of copying..

There are no wars in which the innocent don't suffer....and usually suffer the most. .. My opinion of course and to each his own.

What contemptible scoundrel has stolen the cork to my lunch? -- W.C. Fields "Many of those who enjoy freedom know little of its price." You can't fix Stupid, but you can occasionally head it off before it hurts something.

If the annual whiskey consumption was 100,000,000 gallons per year and the population of the US was 103,000,000 people (US Census Bureau) and the consumption is one gallon per personper year. That means they are counting women and children in the one gallon per year, so menare obviously drinking more than one gallon per year........ greedy....

What contemptible scoundrel has stolen the cork to my lunch? -- W.C. Fields "Many of those who enjoy freedom know little of its price." You can't fix Stupid, but you can occasionally head it off before it hurts something.

American troops are continuing to get a little front line experience in generally quiet areas. When there is a minor action there are exaggerated headlines in one US paper. Little do they know the real war for Americans hasn't begun yet.